Wang Weilin, the young man who stopped the tanks in Tiananmen Square
Ten years ago this week the world watched in horror as the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. But what happened after the camera crews left? John Gittings tracks the fortunes of four individuals who dared to defy Beijing
Monday 31 May 1999 12.47 EDT
Wang Weilin, the young man who stopped the tanks in Tiananmen Square, has disappeared from sight, though not from history. China's president Jiang Zemin said the police had checked morgues, prisons and computer registers, but were unable to find any trace of him.
Weilin, if that is his real name, may have been the lucky one that got away. Hundreds of others students, musicians, teachers, engineers, farmers, shopkeepers and civil servants have been less fortunate. Their tales are pathetic, heroic, tragic or bizarre, but they rarely get told. How many people inside or outside China have even heard of the Egg-throwers of Tiananmen Square?
The time was May 23, 1989, 10 days before the massacre began. The target was the huge portrait of Mao Zedong. The eggs, begged off an itinerant pancake-seller, were filled with paint and ink. Yu Dongyue and two comrades had travelled from Hunan Mao Zedong's home province to make their protest against the Communist Party's "feudal rule". Within an hour, a reserve portrait had been hoisted to replace the splattered one.
The students in the square, believing that the three were agents provocateurs , seized them and handed them over to the police. It was a terrible mistake, for their brief gesture of defiance was judged to be an act of "counter-revolutionary sabotage". Yu and his two companions are now serving sentences of 20, 19 and 16 years in a squalid Hunan jail. All have spent time in solitary confinement, described by a former prisoner as "just over two square metres in area [with] no ventilation or heating . . . and almost pitch-dark".
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